Philosophy of mental time — A theme introduction

(First paragraphs.) — The notion of “mental time” refers to the experience and awareness of time, including that of past, present, and future, and that of the passing of time. This experience and awareness of time raises a number of puzzling questions. How do we experience time? What exactly do we experience when we experience time? Do we actually experience time? Or do we infer time from something in, or some aspect of our experience? And so forth. These and many related questions in the “philosophy of mental time”, the topic of this special issue of the Annals of the Japan Association for Philosophy of Science, are not purely philosophical questions. Or at least, they are not likely to be satisfactorily answered by philosophers alone. Rather, they also need the input of neuroscientists, psychologists, physicists, linguists, and others. And conversely, answers to these questions may have implications outside the scope of philosophy. The papers in this special issue illustrate this inherent multi- or interdisciplinarity of the philosophy and science of mental time. In this theme introduction, we want to give a few more examples to illustrate this interdisciplinarity, but also to point out that much of the field is still wide open—that is, these illustrations raise more questions than answers

Working while enrolled in a university: Does it pay?

Working while studying at university increases the time-to-degree and may interfere with learning, but the acquired work experience may also improve employment opportunities and increase wages after the graduation. This study examines how university students' employment decisions affect their labor market success after the graduation. The study is based on an individual panel data set of Finnish university students. The data set covers the years 1987-1998, which was a period of significant changes in the Finnish labor market. The study finds that in-school work experience increases graduates' earnings at the beginning of the career, but there are no statistically significant persistent effects on employment or earnings after controlling for the selection bias in work experience acquisition.university; in-school work; earnings

Gribov-Zwanziger action in SU(2) Maximally Abelian Gauge with U(1)3_3 Landau Gauge

We construct the local Gribov-Zwanziger action for SU(2) Euclidean Yang-Mills theories in the maximally Abelian (MA) gauge with U(1)$_3$ Landau gauge fixing based on the Zwanziger's work in the Landau gauge. By the restriction of the functional integral region to the Gribov region in the MA gauge, we give the nonlocal action. We localize the action with new fields and obtain the action with the shift of the new scalar fields, which has the terms, corresponding to the localized action of the horizon function in the MA gauge. The diagonal gluon propagator in the MA gauge at tree level behaves like the propagator from Gribov-Zwanziger action in the Landau gauge and shows the violation of Kallen-Lehmann representation

Network and psychological effects in urban movement

Correlations are regularly found in space syntax studies between graph-based configurational measures of street networks, represented as lines, and observed movement patterns. This suggests that topological and geometric complexity are critically involved in how people navigate urban grids. This has caused difficulties with orthodox urban modelling, since it has always been assumed that insofar as spatial factors play a role in navigation, it will be on the basis of metric distance. In spite of much experimental evidence from cognitive science that geometric and topological factors are involved in navigation, and that metric distance is unlikely to be the best criterion for navigational choices, the matter has not been convincingly resolved since no method has existed for extracting cognitive information from aggregate flows. Within the space syntax literature it has also remained unclear how far the correlations that are found with syntactic variables at the level of aggregate flows are due to cognitive factors operating at the level of individual movers, or they are simply mathematically probable network effects, that is emergent statistical effects from the structure of line networks, independent of the psychology of navigational choices. Here we suggest how both problems can be resolved, by showing three things: first, how cognitive inferences can be made from aggregate urban flow data and distinguished from network effects; second by showing that urban movement, both vehicular and pedestrian, are shaped far more by the geometrical and topological properties of the grid than by its metric properties; and third by demonstrating that the influence of these factors on movement is a cognitive, not network, effect

Heavy-heavy-light quark potential in two approaches

We perform the first study about the heavy-heavy-light quark potential in lattice QCD and a potential model. We find that the inter-two-quark confining force is reduced by valence quark motional effects compared to the string tension.Comment: Talk given at YITP International Symposium: Fundamental Problems in Hot and/or Dense QCD, Kyoto, Japan, 3-6 March 200